In the alternative timeline, where the Cold War ended with the triumph of the Nationalists. One last battle has be fought.
Europe is running out of any possible energy resources, the industry is stagnating and European Union's greatest foe - the union of Eastern European rogue states known as the "Intermarum" has issued an economic blockade on its mighty western neighbor.
Too long we have tolerated these hordes making illegal genetic experiments on people and polluting our holy continent with the wastes of their nuclear production. Too long they have polluted the North Pole and refused to disarm. It's time, commander. It's time, commander, to break through their failed regime with our legions of steel and fire.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, primarily because of the destruction of the existing system of the bipolar world. Many had hoped that the end of the "cold war" will get rid of large military expenditures and the released resources will be directed to the solution of global problems - food, energy, environmental and others. However, these expectations were not met. In place of the "cold war" has come an even bitter struggle."

The deconstruction of falling stars

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, primarily because of the destruction of the existing system of the bipolar world. Many had hoped that the end of the "cold war" will get rid of large military expenditures and the released resources will be directed to the solution of global problems - food, energy, environmental and others. However, these expectations were not met. In place of the "cold war" has come an even bitter struggle for energy resources. In essence, a new division of the world. In the course are any funds until the occupation of the independent states. "
- Alexander Lukashenko

European Union - the European Empire

The oil is depleting. Though they say the global oil reserves will be enough to feed us for 10-20 years more, there is a ceiling after which extraction of oil resources is useless, as humanity loses the same amount of energy digging oil as the amount of energy it gets by burning it. Our world is too much dependent on oil today, depletion of which will effectively decimate the modern economy. Prompting 5% of available workforce to be reassigned on generating electricity – if we want to live the same life. Otherwise we need to tell our people that soon they will have to give up personal cars, computers, burn lumber and get closer to the stone age. Which would be a catastrophe.

This was the central message the leaders of great European powers were discussing.

But there is a solution: the newly-discovered and vast Arctic resource vault. Unfortunately Russia has already claimed too the Arctic treasury as its own.
If Europe is going to survive, if Europe is going to become energetically independent, Arctic is the key. With the US gone out of the Eastern hemisphere, we need to become a new empire. If we want to secure our future.

Rising stars

Meanwhile the break-away half of EU has formed an independent coalition of Eastern European states - breathing new life into the idea about Intermarum by Polish leader of XX century Józef Piłsudski. Under the threat of military intervention of both Russia and Turkey and animosity from EU, more and more states join the newly-formed Federation of Intermarum, seen by Poland as the direct resurrection of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a new Warsaw Pact or Yugoslavia by others. The need for Intermarum became apparent when nobody was able to defend Yugoslavia during the EU intervention in Yugoslav wars.

While somewhere on the South East of the European continent, Turkey starts to gather its nascent military power into one mighty fist and to claim ex-Soviet Asian republics one after another, building an empire of its own and getting dangerously close to both Russia's and Europe's borders...

So... stay tuned with us, we will spotlight the further development of our alternate history universe and its "heroes" further in next updates ^_^
And a couple of Intermarum\Russian cargo planes in case somebody has not seen them yet in our gallery:

That Intermarum sounds original, but would never work. Nobody likes Poland, haha. And it looks small compared to EU.

Czech and Slovakia would go together. It may look meaningless to you, but for me it is quite important. Join Czech to Intermarum, or Slovakia to EU (don't know which is more probable, both Czech and Slovakia people don't like EU and Polish).

Intermarum also consists from Ukraine, Belarus and some Yugoslav states - so overall it's even bigger than EU
And I see the ex-Soviet states of Belarus and Ukraine an even stronger unifier than Poland. By 1991 they possessed industry bigger than that of biggest Western European states.
Another unifying feature I see that the people of Eastern Europe speak related languages - after all, they're mostly all Slavs. I could have called Intermarum Slavia if it didn't had non-Slavic states inside like Romania and Hungary. Actually it's a conflict of Germanic\French West and the Slav world together with it allies.